Stephanie O'Donohoe

Why young consumers are not open to mobile marketing communications

This paper explores young people’s motivations for using mobile phones. Older adolescents’ everyday use of traditional and new forms of mediated communication were explored in the context of their everyday lives, with data generated from self-completion questionnaires, diaries and mini focus groups. The findings confirm the universal appeal of mobile phones to a youth audience. Social and entertainment-related motivations dominated, while information and commercially orientated contact were less appealing. While marketers are excited by the reach and possibilities for personalisation offered by mobile phones, young people associated commercial appropriation of this medium with irritation, intrusion and mistrust. In other words, while marketers celebrated mobile phones as a ‘brand in the hand’ of youth markets, young people themselves valued their mobiles as a ‘friend in the hand’. This suggests that the way forward for mobile marketing communications is not seeking or pretending to be young consumers’ friend, but rather offering content that helps them maintain or develop the personal friendships that matter to them.

Attitudes to Advertising: A Review of British and American Research

This article compares British and American literature on public attitudes to advertising in general. Overall levels of approval are examined, as is research identifying and describing attitudinal dimensions. The review highlights the complexity and ambivalence of attitudes to advertising in both countries, and the lack of research seeking to understand rather than to measure these attitudes. Differences in attitudes also emerged between the two cultures, meriting concern at the heavy reliance on American surveys—and theories—in the general field of advertising.

Buying into motherhood? Problematic consumption and ambivalence in transitional phases

Current theory on transitional consumption seems to rest on the premises that (1) consumption facilitates role transitions; (2) consumers know how to consume their way through these transitions; (3) consumers are motivated to approach new roles; and (4) consumption solves liminality. This perspective, however, offers an incomplete picture of consumption’s role in the management of major life transitions. This article explores the ways in which ambivalence is woven through consumption experiences in times of liminality. It reviews prior research on consumption, role transitions, and ambivalence in the context of women’s transition into motherhood. Findings are presented from an international interpretive study of women’s consumption experiences during their transition to motherhood. This paper’s findings suggest that while consumption can indeed play a positive role during role transitions, it can also, at other times, make transition a complicated, complex and confusing process.Title Buying into motherhood? Problematic consumption and ambivalence in transitional phases Authors(s) VOICE Group; Davies, Andrea; Dobscha, Susan; Geiger, Susi; Prothero, Andrea; et al. Publication date 2010 Publication information Consumption, Markets and Culture, 13 (4): 373-397, Special Issue: Consumer Culture Theory 2008 Publisher Routledge (Taylor & Francis) Item record/more information http://hdl.handle.net/10197/4966 Publishers statement This is an electronic version of an article published in Consumption Markets & Culture, Volume 13, Issue 4, 2010. Consumption Markets & Culture is available online at: www.tandfonline.com//doi/abs/10.1080/10253866.2010.502414 Publishers version (DOI) 10.1080/10253866.2010.502414

Counter-culture and consumer society

This paper addresses a topic which has been relatively neglected in the marketing and consumer research literature. Our aim is to rejuvenate discussion of what constitutes counter‐culture and what it implies about culture and consumption. Drawing on Hegels lordbondsman tale, we present three different ways of framing this complex subject. These frames are entitled authentic counterculture, the mediation of counter‐culture and counter‐culture as difference. Through the frames we chart the transition from revolutionary to aesthetic counter‐culture and the central role played in this process by the developing commodity culture. Next we discuss the implications of the aestheticization of social space for counter‐cultural theory and practice, illustrating this with examples of various British and American counter‐cultural groupings and activities. In charting these changes we discuss how the ultimate aim of counter‐culture has shifted from transcendence to resistance, and ask whether the return to some more global theory might ever again be possible. Finally we evaluate the usefulness of Hegels tale in the light of the previous discussion and suggest issues which require further attention from researchers interested in culture and consumption.

Mobile phones as an extension of the participant observer's self: reflections on the emergent role of an emergent technology

Purpose – This paper examines the value of mobile phones in ethnographic research, and seeks to demonstrate how this particular technology can support and enhance participant observation.Design/methodology/approach – Reflecting in detail on one researchers experience of incorporating this technological device into an ethnographic study, the paper considers how new observational tools can contribute to research beyond data generation.Findings – The study suggests that the mobile phone can be an extension of the ethnographer and act as a powerful prosthetic, allowing the researcher to translate ethnographic principles into practice.Research limitations/implications – This paper reflects on the uses of a mobile phone in an ethnographic study of young mens consumer experiences. Thus, the discussion focuses on a research site where the mobile phone holds a ubiquitous position. However, there are now more than four billion mobile phones in circulation worldwide, so whilst acknowledging important differences i...

The sadness of lives and the comfort of things: Goods as evocative objects in bereavement

Abstract This paper seeks to understand the texture and emotional tenor of the relations that bereaved people can have with a range of objects, including those that seem mundane or simply part of the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life. Taking Joan Didions best-selling book, The Year of Magical Thinking, as its focus, the paper examines the varied and significant roles that certain objects played as she negotiated the vagaries of her first year as a widow. While previous literature has mined the memorialising function of goods for survivors, our analysis suggests that goods and consumption experiences can also play a powerful role as tools to think with for those struggling to create a meaningful narrative of death and loss. It concludes by considering the contribution of the analysis to the understanding of goods as ‘active life presences’ (Turkle, 2007), the relationship between consumption and bereavement, and ‘the sadness of lives and the comfort of things’ (Miller, 2008).

Reflections on collaboration in interpretive consumer research

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the challenges and opportunities of collaboration in interpretive consumer research. Design/methodology/approach – The paper reviews literature on research teamwork, particularly on qualitative and international projects. It also provides an account of research collaboration on an interpretive research project across four countries, involving eight researchers. Findings – Despite the cult of individualism in academic life, most articles in leading marketing journals are now written by multi-author teams. The process and implications of research collaboration, particularly on qualitative and international projects, have received little attention within the marketing literature. Qualitative collaborations call for another layer of reflexivity and attention to the politics and emotions of teamwork. They also require the negotiation of a social contract acceptable to the group and conducive to the emergence of different perspectives throughout the research process. Originality/value – While issues surrounding the researcher-research participant relationship are well explored in the field, this paper tackles an issue that often remains tacit in the marketing literature, namely the impact of the relationships between researchers. The paper draws on accounts of other research collaborations as well as authors’ experiences, and discusses how interpersonal and cross-cultural dynamics influence the work of interpretive research teams.

Fatal errors: unbridling emotions in service failure experiences

There is little chance of researchers steeped in the Saxon tradition being led astray by the ‘...often private, disguised, inchoate, non-conscious, non-rational and multidimensional characteristics ascribed to, and experienced in, emotion’ (Sturdy, 2003, p. 99). Although emotions may be uncomfortable territory for the Saxon researcher, they constitute a natural habitat for Celts, who are ‘undisciplinable, anarchical, and turbulent by nature’ (Arnold, 1891, p. 91). This paper explores emotional dimensions of service failure experiences. In keeping with the Celtic spirit, its origins have more to do with coincidence than calculation; unsolicited comments from interviews with service providers dealing with bereaved consumers led us to explore service failure in a context that was already highly charged. Reviewing studies on these issues, we were shocked by how methodologically circumscribed, emotionally sterile, and essentially trivial much research in this area appeared to be. According to this literature, for example, the most serious service breakdowns involve consumers finding no record of their reservation at a hotel (Levesque and McDougall, 2000), receiving incorrect items by mail order or getting the wrong room key in a hotel (Palmer, Beggs and Keown-McMullan, 2000). Undoubtedly such incidents are annoying, but the marketing literature appears silent on a whole range of service encounters that are difficult and distressing even before a service breakdown occurs. It also appears to have neglected what might be termed ‘fatal errors’—critical, irreversible mistakes that affect us as ‘people first and consumers second’ (Schneider and Bowen, 1999), such as a cancelled flight preventing us from attending a funeral. In the following sections, we review literature on emotions in services and on service failure and recovery. We then present a study examining the experiences of frontline staff who deal with

Mortality, morality and the marketplace: Empathetic improvisation and the double duty of care in bereaved consumers’ service encounters

ABSTRACT In the field of death studies, there is growing recognition that other people, culture and the dead themselves shape individual experiences of bereavement. Service encounters are a key but under-researched site for examining these interactions, broader relationships between mortality, the marketplace and consumer culture, and their implications for consumer well-being. This interpretive study explores service encounters from the perspective of bereaved American consumers. Our data suggest that bereavement rendered service encounters doubly heterogeneous, and that continuing bonds between the living and the dead often placed a double duty of care on service providers, since the interests of the dead as well as the well-being of survivors were at stake. From the bereaved consumer’s perspective, this double duty of care seems more likely to be discharged through empathetic improvisation rather than standardised performances of saccharine sensitivity by service providers.

Mortality, morality and the marketplace

ABSTRACT In the field of death studies, there is growing recognition that other people, culture and the dead themselves shape individual experiences of bereavement. Service encounters are a key but under-researched site for examining these interactions, broader relationships between mortality, the marketplace and consumer culture, and their implications for consumer well-being. This interpretive study explores service encounters from the perspective of bereaved American consumers. Our data suggest that bereavement rendered service encounters doubly heterogeneous, and that continuing bonds between the living and the dead often placed a double duty of care on service providers, since the interests of the dead as well as the well-being of survivors were at stake. From the bereaved consumer’s perspective, this double duty of care seems more likely to be discharged through empathetic improvisation rather than standardised performances of saccharine sensitivity by service providers.